Arna
Wendell Bontemps was born on October 13, 1902, in Alexandria,
Louisiana, the son of a Creole bricklayer and schoolteacher. At age
three he and his family moved to Los Angeles after his father was
threatened by two drunk white men. Bontemps grew up in California, and
was sent to the San Fernando Academy boarding school with his father’s
instruction to not “go up there acting colored.” This Bontemps later
noted as a formative moment, and he would resent what he saw as an
effort to make him forget his heritage. He graduated from Pacific Union
College in Angwin in 1923 with an A.B.

In 1924 he accepted a
teaching position in Harlem. He married Alberta Johnson, a former
student, in 1926; they would eventually have six children. Though his
original plan was to obtain his Ph.D. in English, he accepted teaching
positions to support his family. Luckily, it was while teaching in
Harlem that he would become closely connected to the Harlem Renaissance
and befriend major artists such as Countee Cullen, W.E.B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and especially Langston Hughes, with whom he frequently collaborated.

Bontemps first published his poems in Crisis in 1924, and also later in Opportunity,
both literary magazines that supported the work of young African
American writers. In 1926 and 1927 Bontemps win three prizes for his
poetry from these publications. His first book of fiction was God Sends Sunday
(1931), the story of a fast-living black jockey named Little Augie. The
book received mixed reviews: praise for its significance as a book by a
black author but also criticism for its emphasis on the seamier side of
black life.

That same year Bontemps moved to Huntsville, Alabama,
where he had accepted a position at Oakwood Junior College. In 1932 he
received another prize for the short story “A Summer Tragedy” and
published his first two children’s book, Popo and Fifina: Children of Haiti, with Langston Hughes, and You Can’t Pet a Possum in 1934. He began work on Black Thunder: Gabriel’s Revolt: Virginia 1800,
the story of an aborted slave rebellion led by Gabriel Prosser. The
novel, published in 1936, was finished in his father’s California house.
At the end of the 1934 school year Oakwood dismissed Bontemps, a
reaction to the combination of his radical politics, out-of-state
visitors, his personal book collection, and the school’s own
conservative and religious views.

In 1943 Bontemps received a
master’s degree in library science from the University of Chicago. He
was appointed a librarian at Fisk University, a position he held until
his retirement in 1965, followed by honorary degrees and professorships
at the University of Illinois and Yale University, and a return to Fisk
as a writer in residence.

He died June 4, 1973 from a heart attack, while working on his autobiography. Though Sterling A. Brown
and Aaron Douglas noted that his writings have not received the
critical attention deserved, his work as a librarian and historian point
to him as a great chronicler and a preserver of the documents of black
cultural heritage. His family’s old Louisiana home is now the Arna
Bontemps African American Museum and Cultural Arts Center.

A Selected Bibliography

Poetry

Personals (1963)

Anthology

American Negro Poetry (1963)Golden Slippers: An Anthology of Negro Poetry for Young Reader (1941)Hold Fast to Dreams (1969)The Book of Negro Folklore (1959)The Harlem Renaissance Remembered (1972)The Poetry of the Negro (1949)